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you. If you make sure I’m okay.”
    “Of course,” said Bod, and before he had finished speaking the girl was coming through the hole on her hands and her knees.
    “You can stand up,” Bod told her. He took her hand. “The steps are just here. If you put a foot forward you can find it. There. Now I’ll go first.”
    “Can you really see?” she asked.
    “It’s dark,” said Bod. “But I can see.”
    He began to lead Scarlett down the steps, deep into the hill, and to describe what he saw to her as they went. “It’s steps down,” he said. “Made of stone. And there’s stone all above us. Someone’s made a painting on the wall.”
    “What kind of painting?”
    “A big hairy C is for Cow, I think. With horns. Then something that’s more like a pattern, like a big knot. It’s sort of carved in the stone too, not just painted, see?” and he took her fingers and placed them onto the carved knot-work.
    “I can feel it!” she said.
    “Now the steps are getting bigger. We are coming out into some kind of big room, now, but the steps are still going. Don’t move. Okay, now I am between you and the room. Keep your left hand on the wall.”
    They kept going down. “One more step and we are on the rock floor,” said Bod. “It’s a bit uneven.”
    The room was small. There was a slab of stone on the ground, and a low ledge in one corner, with some small objects on it. There were bones on the ground, very old bones indeed, although below where the steps entered the room Bod could see a crumpled corpse, dressed in the remains of a long brown coat—the young man who had dreamed of riches, Bod decided. He must have slipped and fallen in the dark.
    The noise began all about them, a rustling slither, like a snake twining through dry leaves. Scarlett’s grip on Bod’s hand was harder.
    “What’s that? Do you see anything?”
    “No.”
    Scarlett made a noise that was half gasp and half wail, and Bod saw something, and he knew without asking that she could see it too.
    There was a light at the end of the room, and in the light a man came walking, walking through the rock, and Bod heard Scarlett choking back a scream.
    The man looked well-preserved, but still like something that had been dead for a long while. His skin was painted (Bod thought) or tattooed (Scarlett thought) with purple designs and patterns. Around his neck hung a necklace of sharp, long teeth.
    “I am the master of this place!” said the figure, in words so ancient and gutteral that they were scarcely words at all. “I guard this place from all who would harm it!”
    His eyes were huge in his head. Bod realized it was because he had circles drawn around them in purple, making his face look like an owl’s.
    “Who are you?” asked Bod. He squeezed Scarlett’s hand as he said it.
    The Indigo Man did not seem to have heard the question. He looked at them fiercely.
    “Leave this place!” he said in words that Bod heard in his head, words that were also a gutteral growl.
    “Is he going to hurt us?” asked Scarlett.
    “I don’t think so,” said Bod. Then, to the Indigo Man, he said, as he had been taught, “I have the Freedom of the Graveyard and I may walk where I choose.”
    There was no reaction to this by the Indigo Man, which puzzled Bod even more because even the most irritable inhabitants of the graveyard had been calmed by this statement. Bod said, “Scarlett, can you see him?”
    “Of course I can see him. He’s a big scary tattooey man and he wants to kill us. Bod, make him go away!”
    Bod looked at the remains of the gentleman in the brown coat. There was a lamp beside him, broken on the rocky floor. “He ran away,” said Bod aloud. “He ran because he was scared. And he slipped or he tripped on the stairs and he fell off.”
    “Who did?”
    “The man on the floor.”
    Scarlett sounded irritated now, as well as puzzled and scared. “What man on the floor? It’s too dark. The only man I can see is the tattooey